Axis: the Praxis blog

What happens when we write? Why do we teach writing the way we do? How does writing education engage with questions of race, gender, accessibility, and cultural difference? How does the writing center function as an interdisciplinary space?

Axis extends the writing center conversation from Praxis, our peer reviewed scholarly journal, into a public forum. Exploratory, experimental, and informative, the blog speaks to questions on the cutting edge of writing center theory and practice. Axis features writing from undergraduate and graduate educators at the University of Texas at Austin, and guest writers from universities across the United States.

Back in January of this year, during a visit to Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville, Tennessee, President Obama announced a plan to provide two free years of community college attendance for eligible students, and earlier this month the U.S. Senate began to draft a bill intended to put the initiative into action. This follows intense lobbying that has made public and private HBCUs and minority-serving institutions part of the initiative, and the 90 billion-dollar plan is under intense scrutiny from all sides. The question this raises is why the existing challenges of community college students and scholars are not.

One was the kingdom of writing center outreach to underserved high schools. In a session entitled “It’s a Small World: Creating Collaborative Communities,” Denise Stephenson spoke about the challenges involved in setting up effective collaborations across institutions. High schools have different structures than colleges, different professional jargon, different pressures on teachers (think mandated testing), and different points of entry. This last difference was particularly challenging for Denise, who found herself directed to talk to administrators instead of teachers about the kind of support her consultants could provide. The message got lost along the communication chain, and her first tutors found themselves underutilized—a situation she has since corrected by insisting on meeting with the teachers well before the start of the academic year.

The 2014 IWCA conference, held this weekend at Disney's Coronado Springs Resort, Orlando Florida, was titled, appropriately enough, "The Wonderful World of Writing Centers." And much like DisneyWorld itself, it demonstrated that each kingdom contains its own sub-kingdoms, intersecting and connecting.